After Nations: Interview with Rana Dasgupta

Last year, we had the pleasure of hosting the writer Rana Dasgupta at the Windham-Campbell Prizes Festival, where we were thrilled to present a discussion of his then-forthcoming nonfiction book After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order. Now that this work is out in the world and garnering praise for its lucid look at how nation-states established themselves and where this form of governance might be heading next, we sat down with the author to pose a few questions:

INTERVIEWER: Hello, Rana! Here on the team, we’re curious about how the idea for this book first came to you?

DASGUPTA: I started thinking about it following Prime Minister Modi’s election in India, Trump’s first election in 2016, Brexit that same year, and the expansion of the far right in France. I thought, “Are these things all just happening at the same time by coincidence? Or are they actually part of the same phenomenon—some kind of transition in the nation-state system itself?” It was easy to imagine why a transition might be happening: finance, technology, and even ecology were exerting a far greater influence on politics than before, preventing states—for instance—from delivering equality to their citizens. I decided to investigate the origins of the nation-state system, to find out what its purpose was supposed to be in the minds of the people who designed it, and to try to understand what fundamental imperatives it obeyed—all in the hope of answering the questions of our time: where is our political system taking us, and is it capable of delivering the kind of world we desire? 

INTERVIEWER: And, so, where do you see the tides of nationalism heading next?

DASGUPTA: A major part of the crisis that we face today is that states—I’m talking here primarily about Western states—don’t provide a sense of belonging in the way that they did in the late-20th-century. So, the idea of “home” returns on both the right and the left—most obviously on the right, which proposes a simplified conception of home, a return to a fictional past without foreigners, where values and community were strong. But those mythologies can only distract temporarily from the very real changes in Western states, which can never return to the exceptional moment following 1945. There will then be a diversification of political messages, including, possibly, the rise of a left-wing nationalism to rival that of the right, and maybe a left-wing internationalism too. There might even be an anti-state nationalism where people say, “In the spirit of being American, or British or French, we oppose the state.”

INTERVIEWER: The book itself is divided into four parts—France/God; Money/Britain; Law/America; and Nature/China. Are there any other case studies you considered including?

DASGUPTA: The book examines these four pillars of the nation-state and the nation-state system to show how they’re all simultaneously in crisis today. I did consider a fifth part, which was going to be about war. I didn’t write that in the end because I realized that all the other themes of the book ultimately culminated in war. God led to war, as did money and nature. There was war everywhere—because it’s the tool by which everything else is resolved. It’s only for the last 100 years that Western states, including the U.S., have invested more in their populations than in war, viewing their competitive advantage in terms of business and therefore in terms of their domestic human capital rather than the battlefield. Hopefully, we will not give that up. 

If you enjoyed this conversation, head over to the Windham-Campbell Prizes Podcast on Literary Hub where you can listen to Rana’s episode on Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, as well as get to know this year's prize recipients through their favorite works of literature. A new episode with poet Karen Solie on Tomas Tranströmer's Selected Poems, edited by Robert Hass, just went up today!